


Patronym

by amobisan



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Avengers Family, Dear God there's no sex in this, F/M, Gen, I didn't know I could do that, Implied/Referenced Transphobia, Kidfic, OC POV, Trans Character, although she's mostly a background character in this, of a sort, the major character death is completely off-screen and set well before any of the story contents, who's not trans in canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-31
Updated: 2016-01-31
Packaged: 2018-05-17 08:44:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5862082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amobisan/pseuds/amobisan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Patronym (n) -- Family name, esp. as derived from name of one's father or a paternal ancestor.</p>
<p>or, a baby Stark learns about her names.</p>
<p>(Contains 0% porn. Sorry guys, next month will be quite dirty, I promise).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Patronym

**Author's Note:**

> As the tags indicate, a character is trans (transgender) in this work who's not trans in the MCU. If that's a problem, you'll probably want to skip this one.

Patronym (n) -- Family name, esp. as derived from name of one's father or a paternal ancestor

\--

She’s two, the first time she asks why Daddy comes home so badly hurt, sometimes. He’d winced at her hug this time -- she already knows that tape there means cracked ribs, be careful, but sometimes she forgets. He sits beside her, still half in his metal clothes and ignoring it when Aunt Tasha puts an adhesive bandage on the bleeding cut on his forehead, and says “Sweetheart, we’re Starks. Saving people is in our blood. Sometimes Daddy gets hurt so that other people don’t have to.”

\--

When she’s nine and he misses the presentation of her Millennium Problem award (where the President herself got onstage and called her a genius in front of lots of people!) because aliens attacked Stockholm, she yells at him, demands to know why _he_ has to be the one to save people all the time, why he can’t make someone else do it. He looks angry for a second, and then abruptly sad, but only says “Sweetheart, we’re Starks. You know how the other kids your age, when you talk to them, sometimes it’s like they don’t keep up, even though you’re trying to go slow?” She nods, because last week Michelle called her a freak, even though they’re in MENSA-J together and Michelle can beat adults in chess without even trying. “We can do things other people just can’t, even adults. It’s a, a wonderful burden. A terrible privilege. We have a responsibility to use it to help as many people as we can. Even if it hurts sometimes.”

\--

She's three when she first learns that her name is also a word. JARVIS is helping her read a book, one of the Redwall books that Uncle Bruce says she'll like. She reads aloud and he helps her with what the biggest words mean and tells her when she says any wrong, because Aunt Tasha says having a big vo-cab-u-lary and an even bigger ego to go with it is how Daddy didn't get killed in his sleep years ago, which is mean, but the way she says it means she likes him, anyway. She stops when she first sees the word "stark," little like that, and says "Jarvis? This book is printed wrong."

He gently corrects "That would be 'this book is printed _incorrectly_ ,' miss. Why do you believe it is so?"

She thinks about it, because she likes making solid arguments, already. Lots of people don't take her seriously, but Daddy always listens, and last month she gave an argument why the paths on his semi-conductor design were inefficient, instead of just yelling that they were, and he thanked her and changed them so they'd be right, just 'cause she _explained_ it. "Names are, um, p nouns. Proper! Proper nouns, which means they start with a capital letter or they're wrong, uh, incorrect. And my name here starts with a small letter, so it's wr-- incorrectly printed."

JARVIS sounds happy when he answers "Very well done, miss. In the general case, you are quite correct. However, if you recall our discussion two months ago, some last names come from common words, such as Smith or Miller." She nods along, remembering. "'Stark' is such a word."

She cocks her head, puffing out a breath when it makes black curls fall over her eyes, and scrubs them out of her way again as she asks "What does Stark mean? When it's little." JARVIS sounds fond as he displays a dictionary page on the wall for her to read herself. Daddy says it's important that she does things for herself, that it's good to ask for help when she needs it but at the end of the day, if she wants something to happen, she has to rely on herself. Uncle Sam heard him once and said that Mommy would’ve smacked Daddy if she’d heard him telling their kid that at three, but Daddy just said that learning to be responsible to himself first a little bit younger would have saved him a hell of a lot of pain and tens of thousands of innocent bystanders their lives, so stuff it. She knows she wasn't supposed to hear that part, or to remember the swear, but it seemed important, so she tries to do things herself as much as she can anyway. The dictionary says _stark_ means "having a very plain and often cold or empty appearance, being unpleasant and difficult to accept or experience, and being very obvious, very plain and easily seen." She thinks about Daddy's metal clothes, how cold they are when she touches them and how bright they are in the sky when he's flying home to her, and thinks that the dictionary probably printed the word right -- correctly.   

\--

She learns that first names have meanings too when she's six and her Math Camp "classmate" Sofia says her name meant wise, and that's why she was right about that differential equation, and also she's eleven, so shut up, pipsqueak. Daddy already taught her that _argumentum ad hominem_ meant the other person knew they were wrong but were too embarrassed to admit it, and Uncle Clint agreed and said that also if they talk about Hitler they've already automatically lost, and she doesn't know what a Hitler is yet and JARVIS said she had to ask Daddy about that and won't tell her, but she does know it's smarter to go get Doctor Lamar to come over so he'll tell Sofia she's wrong and Sofia won't be able to punch her over it. She tells Uncle Clint all about it when she gets home that night, and he says that she already has Mommy's gift for tactics and twice the sense besides, which is very nice of him even if she doesn't quite understand what he means and he still won't explain what a Hitler is. She does ask JARVIS that night if it's true that "Sofia" means wisdom, and he explains about how first names are picked (and she was right, it was just Sofia's parents being nice when they named her that, because nobody's wise when they're just a baby. She couldn't have earned it herself then, so it doesn't mean anything at all).  When she asks about her name, he says it's her grandmother's and means "Princess," which isn't better than being wise, but it's pretty good anyway.

\--

She figures out the difference between a nickname and a codename when she's eight. She found out what a nickname _was_ when she was four and Uncle Clint called Aunt Tasha "Widow," and she maybe started crying because she learned that word yesterday and it meant Uncle Bruce was dead, and now who would teach her chemistry and have tea parties with her and let her ride his shoulders when he was green? And they explained to her that Uncle Bruce was just fine, and it's just a nickname, from a long time ago way before Uncle Bruce and Aunt Tasha even got married, and it's for a kind of spider anyway. They told her they all had nicknames, even Daddy, and that Daddy even had _two_ , because he was Daddy _and_ Iron Man, and she asked why she didn't have one other than what Daddy called her, like "sweetheart" and stuff, and Uncle Clint said she was a little young to be worrying about her “call sign” (she made sure to ask JARVIS what that was later), but she was just as much of a spitfire as both her parents, just like a little sparkplug, and heh, Starkplug, that kinda works. He's the only one who ever calls her that, but she's always liked it anyway, even decades later, because it was her very first callsign and it was something that was just theirs, like rides on Uncle Bruce's broad green shoulders.

She's eight, though, when she figures out the difference between nickname and codename, because nicknames are something friends use because you're friends, and the man in the scary mask who grabbed her out of Math Camp's Riemann Hypothesis Special Enrichment Event, who's holding her by the throat over the edge of the building's roof and saying that "Iron Man better fucking show up on time or I'm going to paste his whiny little bitch across half of fucking Manhattan" is _not_ Daddy's friend, so it can't be a nickname. The way the man's holding her hurts, but her arms are free so she can reach into her pockets, and before he notices what she's doing, she has the microtaser Daddy made her in her palm, and when she slams it into his arm his muscles spasm, his hand opens and closes uncontrollably like it's supposed to, and she falls, but she saw Daddy's armor already, that _stark_ flash of red, and she knew he'd catch her in time. The next day, when Uncle Clint and Aunt Tasha start teaching her self-defense, she confirms what she suspected about codenames, and Uncle Clint explains about why most people use them (to hide) and why they use them (so they can be just-people, some of the time), and when she manages to sweep his leg out from under him, he blinks up at her and says maybe she does need a callsign already after all.

\--

She's also eight when she really understands what a _slur_ is. Three days after the Riemann Hypothesis session, which she missed _half_ of, which in turn makes her wish she'd hit the man who took her extra hard, she asks Daddy why the man (who's called Bulldozer, which is a silly callsign because those are useful and he wasn't) called her a bitch, when she hadn't even hit him yet. Daddy looks tired, and now that she thinks about it, he hasn't come up from the workshop since they got home, but he rubs his hand over his eyes and says that sometimes people say nasty things to other people who haven't done anything wrong, because they're afraid of something or angry or cruel or just bored. She thinks about it for a little while, and then says "Like they said about Mommy on the TV yesterday? Even though she helped people?"

Daddy looks so, so sad, suddenly, and she abruptly remembers what day it is. She's understood the calendar since she was three, but sometimes she just doesn't bother paying any attention to it, and Uncle Sam always says that proves that she's really Daddy's kid, as if her looks weren't enough. It was _that_ day two days ago, though, and that explains why he's been down here all week apart from rescuing her and why he smells just a teensy bit like three-day-old scotch. He swallows hard and says "Yeah, baby. What, uh. What were they saying?"

She remembers the show, a couple of old guys talking to one another and sounding angry for no reason, and repeats "That she was a freak, and unnatural, and they should have left her where they found her, and that it was God's will she died before she could pervert, well, uh, me. And there was no reason for them to be saying those things. She didn't ever do anything but help people."

He growls under his breath "I am going to sue the shit out of those slanderous --" but cuts himself off and turns back to her and explains it, why strangers would call Mommy those things, and she'd known the definition of the word "slur" since she was four but she didn't really _understand_ it until that day in the workshop with Daddy's sad, sad eyes.

\--

She's thirteen the first time she gets drunk. She just got her first college acceptance letter, and Dad says he's so proud of her, that she's going to do great, and Uncle Clint says that isn't that younger than you were, Tony? Man, what do we even need you for anymore, we've got the new improved model right here! and her Daddy says that she's going to do great things, greater things than he ever did and with clean hands, and he looks sad and -- old. The silver in his hair isn't just at the temples anymore but threading throughout, and the fine lines at his eyes have spread, and it's the first time she really thinks of him as _mortal_. Oh, she'd known he could die, theoretically. He'd been a superhero since before she was born and she'd understood that he faced life-threatening danger regularly since about when she could pronounce the words. But for that -- he had a team to protect him and the suit to shield him, and she'd been helping him work on it since she was seven, because she had to do something, anything, to make sure he'd make it back home to her. But there's no suit that can protect him from time, nothing she can do, and it really sinks in for the first time that someday she would be _it_ , he'd be gone just like Mom and the only one to keep the Stark name strong, to fulfill their birthright of helping people, would be her. Alone.

So she sneaks one of his bottles of scotch out of the workshop, because sure, he only drinks once a year, but it's what _he_ does in the face of one of her parents being gone, so why not try it? Dad finds her halfway into the bottle, and she can still only sort-of feel buzzed when he snatches it out of her hands. He immediately yells for JARVIS to call an ambulance, and why the hell didn't his medical alarms go off before she hit alcohol poisoning, and JARVIS's voice is discordantly soothing when he answers that she hasn't. Dad demands to know what the fuck that's supposed to mean, and JARVIS assures him that, based on the ongoing breathalyzer he has running on her, she's not even over the legal line of impairment, which she can damn well tell because the half-formed buzz is already wearing off and it hadn't even helped when it was at its meager peak. He swallows hard, then, and asks why, and she's not sure if he's asking her why she was drinking or J why it wasn't working, but she's pretty sure they've all known the answer to the latter since the first time she beat Clint sparring a year ago. She answers the first, then, with "It's going to be me. Just me. Someday. I don't want to have to do it without you. I can't help enough people alone."

He looks down for a minute, breathing a little shaky, but then he just hugs her and says "Oh, baby. You won't have to do it alone. Not ever. Even when I'm gone, you'll still have all the rest of our family. You'll take care of each other, just like you all have taken care of me," and if they're both crying, neither acknowledges it. They just sit there, holding on.

\--

The first time someone calls her pretty and means it like _that_ , she's fifteen, and it confuses her. She doesn't look a thing like her Mom, who was prettiest woman she's ever seen. In all the pictures, Mom was blond, and so tall, strong and broad-shouldered enough that they were able to pretend she'd stayed a man after the serum, during the War. Mom wasn't average-height, wasn't flat-chested and skinny (well, not after the serum), and anyway, Sarah's all Daddy's sharp jawline and curly dark hair, even if her eyes are blue like Mom's. But puberty comes on like her impending senior year, and soon enough she's shot up half a foot and rounded out a bit. She doesn't look like Mom, but she kinda likes it when guys call her pretty now, so she doesn't mind it so much even if she still sorta disagrees.

\--

JARVIS explains what "vital records" are when she's four, after a long and rambling series of questions about how the government works, specifically why the government is making a fuss over Uncle Thor trying to marry Aunt Jane. As far as she can work out, they won't give them a marriage license because he doesn't have a state ID because he doesn't have a birth certificate or any other vital records, because he was born off-planet. She asks if she has a birth certificate, and when JARVIS confirms that she does, if she can see it. She looks at it a long while, and notices that it says Mommy's age is 32 but her birth year is 1918. That doesn't add up at all, so she asks Daddy when he gets home that night from evacuating tsunami victims in Jakarta. He sighs and says, quiet like she's probably not supposed to be able to hear him, that he was hoping she'd be at least a little older before he had to explain all this. He picks her up and carries her to the couch, even though she's too old to need picked up like a baby, and he tells her a lot more than he ever had before about Mommy. He talks about when Mommy was a boy a long long time ago, and how that boy went into the Army to protect people even though he was skinny and weak, and how when an Army doctor gave him a medicine called the serum to make him stronger, it made his outsides match his insides and then he was big and strong and not a he anymore, and Mommy fought in the war until she fell into ice protecting people, and everyone thought she was dead, but she was just sleeping, waiting to wake up so she could meet Daddy and they could help people together and make Sarah. She's a little annoyed at how he simplifies things too much, like she's still a baby just 'cause she isn't very tall yet, but he usually only does that when he's really sad, and he seems pretty sad now, so she puts off the questions for later and hugs him, because talking about Mommy always makes him sound so sad but he says he likes her hugs a lot. He pulls a piece of metal on a chain out from under his shirt and rubs at it without seeming to mean to. She peers closely at it and in between swipes of his thumb she makes out  Captain America, and under that Rogers, Stephani-- and then there's a rough round hole punched through where the rest of the tag should be. He leans in and kisses her hair, and doesn't say anything at all for a long, long time.

\--

She's almost seventeen, enjoying the summer break before it's time to start her Master’s, the first time she earns being called "hero."

She's never sure why the reconstituted Wrecking Crew -- half of whom's roster is composed of younger siblings and grown _children_ of originals, by now -- pick that particular bank to rob, nor why they decided to use an untested explosive on the vault door. What she does know is that she's standing next to Angelique in line, keeping her buddy company as she waits to retrieve said buddy's heirloom brooch from the family safety deposit box for the charity gala they're both attending tonight -- Daddy insists she has to up her non-academia schmooze game and she maintains that there's no reason she can't hone her skills _and_ have an entertaining plus-one --  when her too-keen nose warns her of dangerous chemicals spilling, mixing. She's barely had time to scream "Everybody get down!" and bear Angie to the ground before there's a loud WHUMP and the building shakes precariously as the lights flicker and fail. She can immediately smell the acrid tang of, fuck, chemical fire, and a big one. She stands and the fume-laced smoke already crawling along the ceiling makes her cough and her lungs burn even as she breathes deep and yells out, calm and clear "Stay down, stay calm, crawl for the doors. Once you're outside, call emergency services and tell them there's a fire and it's an A-91 situation, that's Alpha Niner One. Go, people, move," and the damnedest thing is, they do. Maybe it's a function of being New Yorkers, residents of one of villainy's top ten hotspots, but they stay calm, help each other, and move efficiently away from the danger. Which means, she thinks with an expression too fierce to properly be a grin, that she's free to go right towards it and finally stretch her legs. The Avengers-must-be-eighteen rule doesn't apply when the bad guys come to you, and even though she'd activated her Avenger beacon the second she caught so much as a whiff, they aren't here yet and she's needed to contain the threat while the cops follow A-91 and establish a secure perimeter around an active suspected-supervillain event. She follows the smoke towards its source, feeling her lungs scorch and heal, scorch and heal, and finds the Crew there in gas masks and fire gear, utterly ignoring the spreading green-tinged flames in favor of emptying the vault, and she gets to work. There's nothing she can do about the fire, but the Crew have a policy of murdering rescue personnel if they'd make a convenient getaway distraction, and that means she has to take them down before the whirling lights get here. She wades into the fight, taking two by surprise before the rest notice her and things start to get serious, even as she feels her comm buzz a Morse "coming bb. eta 3 m" into her hip. She manages a couple of moves she'd learned from watching Mom pull them off in old videos, and a couple more Clint's taught her that he said he developed for her smaller size and correspondingly even greater agility. She holds her own for a few minutes, but eventually they're too many and Bulldozer has her by the throat again in a weird moment of deja vu, though this time he's trying to crush, rather than dangle, and his insults are a lot more explicit. Then there's the high, sweet whine of a repulsor and he's knocked loose by a blast of white light, just in time for her to bounce against a wall, the floor, and straight into a bone-shattering roundhouse that puts him down hard. She and her Dad and the rest of their family fight side by side, containing the fire and hauling off the villains, and when they're done, she staggers outside as Daddy makes a crack about getting shawarma again just like the good old days, and then there's a flurry of noise and light and dozens of reporters run up to her. Covered in blood and soot and with most of her long black hair burned clean away, she realizes, they don't recognize her, and they call after her, asking who she is. She thinks of all the things people have called her over the years, baby, smartass, sweetheart, bitch, Starkplug, freakshow, genius, uppity cunt, Sarah Rogers Stark, and smiles and thinks that somewhere, Mom is smiling too when Sarah answers with "You can call me The Shield."

\--

She’s almost two and a half, the first time Daddy takes her to meet her Mommy. It’s cold out, the sky gray, and when she asks why it keeps making noises, Daddy says that it’s because today is a special day, a sad day, and Uncle Thor is sad too, and that makes the sky make the noises, _thunder_ , sometimes. They go in the car a long way -- forty-two minutes, Daddy taught her how to tell time last week -- and get out in a strange, quiet park with stones with writing on them. It takes her a minute, but after she looks at a couple of them, she realizes that all of them have a name, and numbers, and sometimes other words too on them. She runs up to one, nearly tripping but catching herself on reflex, and traces the words, which are under the surface somehow. She asks Daddy what that is that does that, and he says it’s called carving, and to stay with him, they’re going to meet Mommy. He leans down, takes her hand, and walks slow enough she doesn’t have to run to keep up. After a little while, Daddy stops in front of a stone. It’s different to some of the other ones -- where lots of them have a cross shape above their words, this one has a star inside a couple circles. The first two names are unfamiliar words, and she skips them, but the last one she knows. “That’s my middle name, there. Why is my middle name on the stone?”

Daddy kneels down and scoops her up so she can see the tall stone a little better, and he’s crying but he doesn’t sound like it when he says “That’s your mother’s last name. She wanted you to have both our names. You'll always be a Stark, baby,” he says, and his voice wobbles, but he finishes anyway, “but you’ll always be a Rogers, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was born, well, when my mental Sarah started commenting on the meaning of being a Stark, and about identity issues. I knew her mom was Captain America (with all the serumed-up biology that requires, for it to be passed on), and how unlikely it was for a ciswoman to have been given the serum in the '40s, which got my wheels turning and eventually produced this. Sometimes ideas more out-there than you strictly speaking planned to go sort of fall into your lap.


End file.
